The Die is Cast: Launch of Decentralization and $RUBI

May 1st, 2025

🌍 The Launch of $RUBI

Ad Victoriam.

Rubicon exists to build the World’s Last Financial Exchange — a decentralized, non-custodial trading platform that democratizes access to global markets. Our mission is to accelerate the advent of an open, efficient, and transparent financial system for humanity, governed and operated by its users.

Over the past four years, Rubicon has processed over $200 million in onchain trading volume across many protocol versions. Every trade has been non-custodial, verifiable, and settled onchain.

In a world where traditional finance is dominated by gatekeepers, and much of crypto remains opaque or centralized, Rubicon offers something fundamentally different: an open trading system, fully onchain and governed by its community.

At the heart of that system is $RUBI — a utility governance token and the root of protocol control. $RUBI is a direct fork of Aave V2 governance, deployed on Ethereum. Governance is live, onchain, and publicly verified.

🎁 Claim Live: 4% of Supply to 273k+ Historical Users

We are airdropping 4% of the total $RUBI supply to over 273k historical users who meaningfully used the protocol across its lifecycle.

Claim is live now on Base:

👉 app.rubicon.finance/rewards

This is a live onchain airdrop. **USE OR INVEST AT YOUR OWN RISK - $RUBI IS A UTILITY GOVERNANCE TOKEN FOR ONCHAIN VOTING AND DECENTRALIZATION. There are many risk warnings across our web properties and massive risks that Rubicon faces, this can all go to zero - only use or invest what you can afford to lose on Rubicon; all users agree to our TERMS OF SERVICE.**

To our community: thank you. If you missed this one, please note that 66% of the total supply will be for future airdrops and incentives to users!

⚙️ The Product: Trading for the Open Internet

Rubicon is a powerful onchain trading platform — optimized for ERC-20s and live today on Base, Ethereum, Optimism, and Arbitrum. We’ll expand to other chains in the future. Our origins are on Optimism, whom we love and respect for their support.

The protocol can be described as the legendary triple stack — a three-layer system that ensures users get the best price possible for their swap or trade, and that LPs and market makers can earn in a variety of ways, provisioning liquidity. There are extensive details about the smart contracts and architecture of the Rubicon protocol in our docs.

💠 1. Gladius – Aggregator Layer

RFQ auctions across the open internet. Your order is filled by Rubicon liquidity if we have the best price. Otherwise, we route it externally - game theory and cryptography guarantee users get execution only on their terms at the best price possible. Totally non-custodial, permit2 signature-based, and gasless swap execution.

🏛 2. Classic – Onchain Order Book

The original Rubicon system. Public, performant, and live since 2021. Fully onchain ERC20 limit order book.

🌀 3. Aquila – Uniswap V2 Fork

A passive liquidity layer for composability and simple LPing.

All unified under one interface. All built for speed, scale, and sovereignty.

🪙 $RUBI Distribution Overview

The $RUBI token enables decentralized governance and long-term alignment between the protocol and its community. It is a fork of AAVE v2 Governance.

Total Supply: 10 Billion $RUBI

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 70% — Community Allocation

4% — Historical Airdrop
- Classic (16%): Usage of Rubicon’s onchain order book, favoring maker volume.
- Gladius (20%): Volume swapped or traded through the offchain Gladius RFQ system.
- Aquila (1%): Trading activity on Aquila historically, on select pairs.
- Pools (3.5%): Liquidity provision, weighted by time and value.
- Lazarus (32.95%): Users who lost funds in the 2021 Rubicon Pools exploit on Optimism (an OLD, no longer used liquidity experiment from our origins). This is our second and final airdrop to this cohort — after tens of thousands of OP were previously distributed in prior airdrops.
- OP Rewards (24.55%): Time-weighted recipients of OP during Rubicon’s rewards programs that have continued since the summer of 2023 and our initial grant. Many tens of thousands of OP have been paid to our community thanks to Optimism.
- Promo NFT (0.0005%): Honoring a commitment we made to those who participated in a one-off, Galxe contest for The Big Guy memecoin.
- Community (2%): Stand-out community members. These are people in discord who have earned “Centurion” status and have helped Rubicon over the years with feedback, memes, and dreams.
66% — Long-Term Emissions
- Emitted monthly over 16 years, with allocation actively managed by the DAO. Note, that this 16-year linear vest is irrevocable and commenced. All distributions are voted through Governance.
- The goal is simple: optimize liquidity and volume growth while funding public goods, contributors, and ecosystem expansion. Directly incentivize usage and activities that build the DAO community treasury and Rubicon.
- The only fixed portion at launch is 6 months of upfront LP rewards:
  - RUBI/USDC LPs: 7.5% of monthly emissions - funded and live yield farming on Base!
  - RUBI/WETH LPs: 17.5% of monthly emissions - funded and live yield farming on Base!
- The remaining 75%+ is retroactively distributed based on volume, usage, and community proposals, including:
  - Trading volume on Gladius and Aquila
  - Strategic partnerships
  - User acquisition programs
  - B2B integrations
  - Awareness campaigns
- Rewards are visible and trackable through the live leaderboard:
  
  https://app.rubicon.finance/leaderboard
- The DAO will refine and update this distribution dynamically — rewarding where it works, cutting where it doesn't. This is a live, collaborative system coordinated in the Forum.

🔐 30% — Insider Allocation

19.5% — DevCo Grant (Unlocked)

A one-time grant to the protocol’s DevCo multisig to fund long-term development, research, and help foster decentralization.
10.5% — Contributor Vesting

Founding insider individuals. Onchain, long-term aligned. 6–12 month cliffs, 3–4 year terms. Fully auditable. These tokens are going to team members who have dedicated years of their working life to Rubicon, and hopefully will build with us for many to come.

💧 Protocol-Owned Liquidity

Rubicon’s DAO will pursue protocol-owned liquidity as a core strategy.

Rather than rely on mercenary capital, Rubicon aims to become its own liquidity provider. Over time, the DAO will accumulate LP tokens, ERC-20s, and productive onchain assets — deployed via onchain governance. The founding DAO treasury strategy is to capture as many fees as possible and build massive LP positions to support the DAO onchain - TLDR: DAO should stack LPs.

This stands in stark contrast to the GameStop / Robinhood crisis, where centralized platforms shut down access to protect private market makers.¹ On Rubicon, that is impossible — and over the long term, we aim to build liquidity that cannot be censored and backstops the ecosystem forever.

¹ Footnote: See “The Antisocial Network” by Ben Mezrich for more

🏛 Founding Principles of the Rubicon DAO

The DAO is governed by four core principles:

1. Long-Termism

We build on an infinite time horizon. The 16-year emission curve aspires to this end. Rubicon is the infinite liquidity stack for the infinite machine.

2. Frugality

We turned down Y Combinator in 2021. We bootstrapped Rubicon from scratch without VC capital through the down market and lots of pain. This enabled us to Fair Launch 70% of tokens to users. The DAO must remain lean, efficient, and sovereign - only the paranoid survive.